“What we see happening in the Great Plains, in the years after the Civil War, is different from what had been going on earlier,” said the historian Andrew Isenberg. “In the beginning of the nineteenth century, there’s trade between Native people and Euro-American fur traders. They’re consuming beaver pelts and they’re consuming bison robes. That’s very different from this industrial society in the post–Civil War period that encounters the Great Plains—an industrial society that is much more interested in consuming resources.”
As the Union Pacific pushed west across Nebraska, heading toward California, the Kansas Pacific aimed for Denver from Kansas City, piercing into the heart of the buffalo range of the central Plains. To feed the hungry crews laying track, the railroad company hired an ambitious and flamboyant twenty-one-year-old Union veteran, paying him $500 a month to keep them supplied with the meat from twelve buffalo a day. His name was William F. Cody. By his own account, he killed 4,280 bison during a year and a half to fulfill his contract. Within a few years—thanks in part to his talent for self-promotion and his incorrigible habit of embellishing his actual exploits—he would become one of the nation’s most famous westerners, but under a different name: “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
Homesteaders along newly completed sections of the railroad lines also discovered that bison could be useful for getting ahead in life. Some hunted buffalo to feed their families or to supplement their meager incomes by hauling buffalo meat to railroad depots for passengers to feast on. Nearly all of them gathered the ubiquitous dried manure piles (called “buffalo pies” or “buffalo chips”) to burn in their stoves and fireplaces for cooking their meals and keeping their sod houses warm.
Railroad passengers often amused themselves by firing at the herds that sometimes slowed a train’s movement. “[It] was the greatest wonder that more people were not killed, as the wild rush for the windows, and the reckless discharge of rifles and pistols, put every passenger’s life in jeopardy,” wrote Elizabeth Custer, traveling to join her husband, an Army officer stationed in Kansas. To publicize its progress across the Plains, the Kansas Pacific even promoted excursion trips for passengers eager to see—and shoot at—the buffalo they were sure to encounter. “In estimating the number,” a satisfied customer reported, “the only fitting word was ‘innumerable;’ one hundred thousand was too small a number, a million would be more correct.”